What is the purpose of a roadmap?

Before you start working with a roadmap you should consider the purpose of the roadmap. Traditionally a roadmap has been a list of bigger features plotted out in a timeline. A lot of the time the purpose of such an approach to roadmaps is to create a false sense of security.

What do I mean by that?

Well, no one can predict what is going to happen in the future. Even though you did your research, estimated and got a commitment from your engineers on a future feature, it most certainly won’t be completed at the predicted date.

There is also another problem with roadmaps that focuses on features. A feature does not guarantee the desired outcome. If we seek a certain outcome, only after the feature that is thought to deliver the specific outcome is released and used by actual users, we can confirm whether it did or did not deliver the outcome.

Thus, a roadmap that focuses on features and dates are doomed to fail.

Rather, the purpose of a roadmap is to:

Focus on the future desired outcomes

Promote your product with stakeholders

First, let’s talk about outcomes. Outcomes are in my opinion the only real indicator of progress. If we, for example, want to increase the time spent using a product, the desired outcome can be “Increase time spent using a product with 10% in each session”. Only an increase in that metric will fulfill the outcome.

How we reach this outcome is uncertain until we actually reach it. It could be anything from small tweaks in the design, a completely new interface or new features in the product.

The second purpose is to bring all stakeholders together and create a shared understanding of where we are going and why. A good roadmap will bring excitement about the product’s future potential.

So, in summary, a roadmap should not:

Focus on features

Promise dates

Rather, a roadmap should:

Focus on outcomes

Get stakeholders excited about the product’s future

What should a product roadmap contain?

Now that we have established the purpose of a roadmap we need to consider what components it should include.

The primary components of a good roadmap that rally your troops and sees nothing else than outcomes are:

Product vision

Business objectives

Outcomes

Status

Disclaimer

Product vision

A product manager is sometimes referred to as the CEO of a product. And as all good CEOs know, you need to establish a vision. This is just as true for products as for companies.

A product vision should ideally be aligned with your company’s vision and answer the following questions:

Who are the target customers?

What are their needs?

What is the product name and what is it?

What are the product benefits?

What differentiates it from competitors?

With a product vision established, you know have an excellent answer to why your product exists in the first place. The vision will also act as a guiding star for your roadmap.

Business objectives

The next component to include in your product roadmap are the business objectives. These should be closely tied to your vision and identify what needs to be accomplished in order to fulfill the vision.

Here are three tips regarding business objectives:

Everything on your roadmap should be connected to one or more objectives

Keep the number of objectives for your product below five

Focus your objectives on outcomes

Outcomes

The main components of your roadmap should be the outcomes. You can think of these outcomes as “sub-outcomes” to your objectives.

An outcome is something that brings value to either your customers or stakeholders. Desired outcomes are much more stable than features and will by default change a lot less. This will let you spend more time delivering value rather than constantly update your roadmap.

Status

I am a strong believer in date free roadmaps. Doing new development in an agile fashion will leave no room for estimating and promises on delivery dates. Therefore, it is much better to leave out dates completely.

Rather you can indicate which outcomes that your team currently are working on to realize and what we think should be the next outcome when we are finished with the current one.

In order for this to work properly, you also need a good way to prioritize between outcomes. We will address techniques for that later in the article.

Disclaimer

Not everyone who reads your roadmap will have the knowledge and insights that you have. Therefore, it is important that you include a disclaimer which clearly indicates the purpose of the roadmap. Otherwise, some might consider your roadmap as a project plan, which it clearly is not.

How do you gather inputs to your roadmap?

We have now established that a roadmap should be based on outcomes that bring value to your customers or stakeholders. But, how do we find out what that is?

Here is a list of important questions you should be asking yourself and find answers to:

What do people need?

Who are the users?

How do people currently solve a problem?

What is the users’ workflow?

Do people want the product?

Can people use the product?

Which design generates better results?

How do people find stuff?

How to find participants?

There are all great questions. You can answer many of them by simply observing customers using your product or other ways they are trying to solve their problem.

When you observe them you should take note and map their customer journey. By doing so with a few typical customers you will most likely have gained a good amount of customer insight. Whenever you see that they struggle you have a golden opportunity for an improvement that could yield your product a competitive advantage and create a better outcome.

The end results from this exercise should be a set of personas and their respective customer journey trying to solve a problem.

How do you achieve alignment from stakeholders?

Let’s say you have finished your roadmap and that you did most of the work alone. You feel proud and want to present it to your stakeholders as soon as possible.

Don’t do it!

If you do it like that you won’t find alignment to your roadmap items. You might reach consensus or collaboration, but never alignment.

In order to reach alignment, you need to involve all your stakeholders early in the process. You need to talk to them and listen to their concerns and objectives with the product. I find that the best way to do this is to sit down with one at a time for 30-60 minutes. You should mostly be focusing on asking questions and listening.

After you have done so with all your stakeholders you should have gained a lot of feedback regarding their needs and fears. Use this input and add it to your roadmap.

The reality is that many of their needs won’t find their way to the roadmap, even less likely to the product. You should not over-promise during these meetings, rather set their expectations low. A big part of the job as a product manager is to say no to feature requests. Since we now have established that we firstly focus on outcomes and values. And a specific feature request from one stakeholder might not be in line with our desired outcomes.

How do you prioritize your roadmap?

When you have identified your customers and stakeholders’ needs you are left with the not-so-easy task of prioritizing between them.

But, fear not, there are a number of techniques you can use to do so.

Critical Path

A critical path is an absolute minimum that a product should be able to do so a customer can solve their problem and get the desired outcome. This method will ignore everything that isn’t necessary to reach the end goal. The customer will go through a critical path, things that must be there to do the main thing of the product.

This method is especially useful when launching a new product and can also be considered the MVP (Minimum Valuable Product).

Kano Model

The kano model an interesting way of prioritizing by classifying customer expectations in three levels:

Expected needs

Normal needs

Exciting needs

You can do this by sending a survey to potential/existing customers letting them grade the perceived value of your potential features into one of the three levels. Features that land in the expected needs category could be considered a part of the critical path. When your product has passed beyond the MVP state, the Kano model will help you to prioritize between them as well.

One thing worth noting is the time factor. Features that once were exciting will eventually move down to normal and up as an expected need. Thus, it is obviously important to update your Kano model semi-regularly.

Desirability, Feasibility, Viability

The two above mentioned methods have a common flaw, they don’t consider other factors other than customer value. And I doubt that you are in a situation where money and time isn’t a factor. Thus, we should include a few other factors in our prioritization models to make them more realistic.

The desirability, feasibility and viability model is quite useful. As the name suggests it factors in customers’ expected value (desirability), the effort and difficulty to build it (feasibility) and the business side, can we make money from it (viability)?

By scoring each of the three criteria you will get a total score that can help in prioritizing your features.

ROI Scorecard

If you thought the Desirability, Feasibility, Viability model was good enough, you thought wrong!

In order to prioritize scientifically, we must include even more criteria and do some calculations. The basic idea is value/effort = priority. Value is here defined as customer value + organization goals. Thus, we add up two important stakeholders’ perceived value of an item in the roadmap. The effort is the complexity and time it will take to implement whatever solution you find to meet your customers’ needs. The last factor we need to consider is a grade of confidence in your value and effort estimates. Customer needs that are well understood and solutions that are well defined will have a high confidence factor while the opposite is true for needs that are wage and thas has unknown solutions.

I will just leave you with the links for now. Might do reviews and comparison in the future, it’s on my content roadmap 😉

Final thoughts

To focus more on outcomes than on features is perfect for a roadmap. Features are of course extremely important but are up for change more often that outcomes. Features have their own place, but then in a format more like a release plan.

I also believe roadmaps should be more tuned into the OKRs concept with a few objectives and clear measurable key results.

Today I am going to show you how to do email outreach using only free tools.

The free tools will be:

Tagpacker

Google Sheets

Gmail

Zapier

Hunter.io

YAMM

I will show you exactly, step by step, how to do your email outreach using these tools.

Let’s dive right in.

1. Register for a Google Account

For this method to work you will need a Google Account. You can use your existing account, but, for pedagogical purposes, I will go on and use a brand new account. There is also the privacy factor to take into consideration since some of the tools we will be using require access to your Google Account, which you might not want to give.

The exact steps to create an account is so simple I won’t describe it here.

Anyways, you should end up something like this if you decided on a brand new account.

2. Install Tagpacker

Tagpacker is a free tool to manage bookmarks. We will use it to easily save interesting websites that fit your purpose for email outreach. You can either add websites manually at the Tagpacker website. But, it also comes with a handy Chrome plugin called “Pack It”, which will make our job easy peasy.

Firstly, head over to tagpacker.com and register for an account (you must confirm your email).

For me, I did a search for product management blogs and stepped across Roman Pichler’s website, which I will use as an example. All I had to do then was to open up “Pack It” (or ctrl+shift+z) and save it.

The above screenshots show that you have the option to add extra information about the site, this can be useful later on if you want to segment and customize your outreach emails.

When you saved a website it will show up at your page in tagpacker.com like this:

3. Connect Tagpacker with Google Sheets using Zapier

So far, things have been pretty easy. But now, it will get a little bit more complicated.

The goal here is to automatically add the links we save to Tagpacker to a Google Sheet.

The first thing you need to do it to go here and add a Zap for Tagpacker. Of course, if you don’t have already, you will need to register for a Zapier account.

You should end up here:

The next step is to connect Zapier with Tagpacker. In order to do so, you will need to add an API-key. This key is found in your Tagpacker account after you click the “Create key” link.

Just copy and paste that key here:

The next step can be a little bit confusing. You need to enter your user ID. That is the first part of your API-key.

For example in this API-key, the orange part is your user ID.

5de9047664ce751fd0bcbc78:b5c6a0c3-4ab5-45a2-ac3f-41c891e0994b

When that is done the first part is the Zap is done – getting links from Tagpacker.

Now we need to do a small operation before we continue with the Zap setup

Open a new tab and head over to your Google Drive and create a brand new Google Sheet and add three column names, like this:

Alright, so when that is done we can continue the Zap setup and connect to our newly created Google Sheet.

The first part of this is easy and should look like this.

The next step is to map your Google Sheet and Tagpacker fields together, the end result should look like this.

Now you should be able to test your Zap and get your first data into the Google Sheet.

And there you have it, you can now turn on your Zap and links will automatically end up in your Google Sheet like this:

4. Getting emails

We have now established an easy and semi-automatic way to save websites to a Google Sheet. The next step is to find the email addresses we need to do for our email outreach campaigns.

First off, go and register for an account on hunter.io. Which is an online service for finding emails based on domain names.

YAMM will take data from your Google Sheet, in my case email, pitch and name.

The pitch and name field will be used in my template. The template YAMM uses can be created as a draft email.

For example:

And in the Google Sheets this is the data I have prepared:

Next up is to start YAMM from the add-ons menu and click your way to this screen. Here you will need to choose which email template (draft) that you are going to use and your sender name.

Then you should always do a test email to yourself, but if that looks good, then just click the send button.

Here is what I received in my example:

Here you can see that the name and pitch were picked from what was typed in in the Google Sheet.

Another option is to use the campaign feature in hunter.io. A nice thing they have over there is the option to automatically set follow-up emails if you don’t get any reply. But for this to work, you will have to manually export from the Google Sheet and import into hunter.io.

6. Tips for your outreach campaign

As a final note, here are 10 great tricks to consider when doing your email outreach campaign.

Google Analytics

Most of you probably use GA out of the box, without any customization. Maybe you didn’t even know it was possible to customize GA.

But, it certainly is, and I encourage you to do so.

We will now dig deeper into three features of GA, that will help you gain customer insights and make GA a valuable tool in a customer-driven product development environment.

Goals

Segments

Events

There are of course a lot more useful stuff inside GA, but I feel these three are a good starting point.

Goals

One of the first steps is to set up goals in GA properly.

Now, in order to setup goals, you first need to think hard about what you want to measure.

What are good indicators of customer engagement? A submitted form? Time spent using your product? Clicking on email links?

There are countless different events you could measure.

These goals will be the foundation to measure if changes to your product were helpful or not.

Here I will share with you my four goals I used for Bilkjop.

Number of booked test drives

The primary target of the product is to sell more used cars.

The obvious first though is to enable a buying option on the website.

And, eventually, we will get there.

But, for now, we use the option to collect hot leads from the website by allowing them to book a test drive at the dealer ship.

This is the primary goal, and we measure it closely by tracking each step of the checkout funnel.

All the features on the website are in one way or another connected to this goal.

So, when I talk about customer-driven product development, it is to gain insights into what the customers want from a used cars website to complete our end goal – sell more cars.

Number of financial leads

The second goal we measure is how many leads we generate for our financial services. It is nothing fancy, just measuring how many clicks we have on a specific button. But, it is nonetheless an important goal, since the value of securing a car loan deal with our customers is high.

Users who visited at least one car

To even be able to book a test drive, a visit to a car page it a prerequisite. Therefore, we measure the users who visited at least one car.

Users who visited more than five cars

For most people, visiting just one car isn’t enough for us to find the right fit. Potential car buyers usually check several different options. Therefore, we measure the users who visit more than five different cars.

So, there you have it, the four goals we measure for Bilkjop.

But, wait?

Isn’t this merely reporting on numbers? How does this help me gain customer insights and find out what they want?

It will help you in two ways:

You can use these goals to see how your product increments affect them

You can use them together with segments

And lo and behold, next topic is about segments!

Segments

Segments is sadly an often ignored and overlooked feature of GA. Even though it is pretty “in-your-face” on almost all reports. Yeah, it’s that top bar saying “All Users”.

So, why is it so often ignored and how can you use it?

It isn’t ignored all that much if we think about it. Because when you look at how a specific traffic source behaves, you have already segmented your traffic. The thing I am coming to is that there are so much more to segments, other than traffic sources. And those segments are often overlooked.

GA comes with a pretty neat list of system generated segments. Now, the deal with segments is to compare them and see how the perform against each other.

For example:

Does mobile traffic convert better or worse than desktop traffic?

Does user who did a search visit more pages than those who don’t?

By asking yourself questions like these and analyzing the answers, you will find room for improvements. If, for example, the users who searched visited more pages (and if that is important to you) you should consider encouraging more users to search. You can do so by tweaking the search design, function and location of the search bar, and thus potentially increase the number of users who search.

To go even deeper with segments, you can create your own. A good start is to create a segment for each goal you have.

In my example, I created a segment for each goal. Then I can analyze what the converting traffic for each goal does differently than the non-converters.

I have also created segments for different traffic sources grouped together. This way I can easily compare different traffic sources, in a way that is meaningful for me.

So, the basic idea behind segments is to use the default, create custom ones and compare them against each other. Based on that you will have to get creative and think why they differ and if there is something you can do about it.

When you have implemented something new, you can track the effects by looking at your goals data.

Events

One of the most powerful and useful features of GA is the use of custom events. Hey, they even created Google Tag Manager with custom events in mind.

Events are custom information snippets sent to GA when your users do something in your product that you have specified.

A most basic example could be that when users click a specific button, we can send that button name as an event to GA. You can then use this event and connect it to a goal.

A more advanced example is shown below.

Here we track click on each step in the checkout funnel for a test drive.

And here we track the requested time for the test drives.

As you can see, we can derive any type of information from the customer’s behavior by using custom events. And with GTM (Google Tag Manager) we can do quite a lot without involving programming resources. There are even packages you can install to GTM, where you get a lot of useful events out of the box.

So, as you can see, there is a lot of power in this feature and only your imagination sets the limit on the data you can create with custom events.

There you have it.

Three areas in GA that you can use to understand your customers better. Now, we will move on to another tool from Google and see how it can be used to create products that your customers love.

Google Optimize

Next up is the A/B testing tool Optimize from Google. With this tool, you can easily create A/B test on your website.

As with all Google tools they are tightly integrated with each other. And, there is no difference between Optimize, it is nicely integrated into Google Analytics.

With that integration and a straightforward interface to create A/B test, this tool is one of my favorites.

If you don’t know what an A/B test, it is when you test two different variant and compare them against a given target.

Let me show you two examples that we did with bilkjop.no

Text on CTA button

In our first example, we made an elementary test, two different texts on a CTA button.

Avtal visning VS Booke prøvekjøring (Two variants of saying “Book test drive”). We measured which one of these who generated the most button clicks.

So, what do you think? Which on performed better? Was there a clear winner?

Well, here are the results.

Now, what can we learn from this?

As we see, there was no clear winner. So we can learn that just changing texts and colors on CTA buttons probably won’t have any significant difference.

Many argue that to get real results we need to dig deeper into our visitor’s psychology and find out what their real pain is and how our product can address those. And, this is not simply done by changing word or two on a button.

Nevertheless, let’s have a look at another A/B test with drastically different results.

We wanted to test if choosing date and time for a test drive, and then enter your contact details converted better then the other way around.

What do you think?

Our theory was that it would convert better, since choosing date and time is a lesser commitment than entering your contact details first. And once your are “in-the-funnel”, you will continue, highly inspired by the microtransaction concept.

And guess what?!

Here we have a clear winner – presenting the calendar first is without a doubt the better performer.

Entirely different results than our CTA button text A/B test!

What are our takeaways form these results?

You will probably not find a clear winner by testing small changes like colors and texts. It seems to be better to test more extensive changes to your landing pages.

Think deep, and do customer interviews to find out what your customer’s pain points are and try to address them with a new design.

And test that new design against your old one.

Then you surely will see a clear winner instead of tweaking small things.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool for creating Heatmaps.

So, what are heatmaps and what are they good for?

Heatmaps tracks where your visitors interact on your website.

This can be good since you will learn what parts of your website are the most interesting for you visitors.

By using this information, you can rearrange or promote certain elements more or less depending on how much they are interacted with. You can generate heatmaps based on clicks, mouse movement and scrolling.

Here we have our move Heatmap.

These are some insights we can learn from this:

– The pagination links at the bottom are very popular. Maybe we should replace them with endless scroll.

– The sorting options are much used. Since this is obviously something our users want, we should make sure they are as good as they can get.

– The search bar is not that popular. We could replace it with something our users would rather have in that prominent spot.

– The filter “Forhandler” is popular, should be moved up.

– The filter “Karosseri” is not popular, should be moved down.

– The favorite function are also popular and should stay where it is.

In addition to Heatmaps, Hotjar offers a few other features. Here are the ones I believe are useful:

Polls: You can easily create a poll and implement on your website.

Recruiter: You can implement a popup form on your website asking for persons who are interested in testing your site. This feature can play very well together with Teston for video and screen share testing. You will learn more about Teston next.

Teston

So far, we have used data to interpret how our visitors use and think of our products. This is all very useful, but there is one information source then beats all that.

And that is.. drumroll… observing people and listening to their thoughts as the use your product.

This has traditionally been a quite complex, costly and time-consuming activity.

But, there are now options to digitalize this process as well.

We used a service called Teston where we can get videos of actual people and their screen when using our products.

It is all digital and works like this:

Create a list of activities and question you want the test person to do and answer

Actual people will do your test and record themselves and their screen

Watch the videos and gain customer insights

And the result will look something like this. Here we see the tester’s screen and face. The numbers in the button bar are the shortcuts to the activities/questions in our test script.

My experience with this kind of testing is outstanding. Of course, it depends on the persons doing the test, but the quality was excellent for all the testers I got.

Watching actual usage of the services helps to identify pain points and improvement to the product.

One example was the price slider, which was not very user-friendly when searching for lower priced cars accordingly to our testers. They had problems specifying the from and to price by just using the slider. And when the from and to price were close, the two round slider indicators became one.

From this, we learned that we should improve it to allow the user the enter a from and to price manually.

Don’t hesitate

“Don’t hesitate” it not a tool, but an essential mindset that you should embrace to realize all the things you will learn from the tools we have discussed.

You must not be afraid to test new ideas and concept based on the customer insights you gain.

This will lead to some successes, but also some failures.

Don’t be afraid of that.

Instead, keep track of your data, test new ideas quickly and evaluate. And, if they don’t work, go back to what you had, or try something else. Keep trying, and eventually, you will find something that your customers love.

By adopting an agile framework like Scrum or Kanban, you will enable a setup that allows for failing fast. The basic theory is to come up with an idea, plan it, develop it and release it. Then keep tracking your data to see the results.

Today, I will show you my top 19 project management books that will help you expand your knowledge and become exceptionally valuable to yourself and your clients.

This list might not be like your average project management book list. Rather than focusing on project approaches, principles and methodologies – these books will teach you the more softer and interpersonal skills required to excel as a project manager and move to the next level.

I have made no ranking between the books since they all cater different skill areas and a comparison between them would make no sense.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

The Phoenix Project is written by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford was published in 2013.

The book is written like a novel and tells the story of Bill Palmer, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. One Tuesday morning Bill receives a call from the CEO of the company and he wants him to take charge of a critical project called “The Phoenix Project”.

Bill reluctantly accepts the task and we will then follow Bill’s journey throughout the project. During this journey Bill will encounter a lot of difficulties and problems, many that will make you smiley in resemblance.

But, as you can imagine, after changing the methods and culture within the company, Bill manages to make the project a success.

The book is quite helpful for project managers since it will give you insights, methods and an overview of how improvements can be made to better execute IT projects. If not, it will at least tell you an interesting story spiced with a great deal of humor.

The book is already somewhat a classic within the IT world and considered a “must-read” for IT-professionals.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

Smarter Faster Better is written by Charles Duhigg and was published in 2016.

Duhigg is a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter from The New York Times. With this background one would expect a well written piece – and he doesn’t let you down in that regard.

The book is made up of a few stories promoting different concept that promises you to become more productive and effective if life and business.

While the ideas are not bad, they are not really new either. However, since they are complemented with engaging storytelling this makes the book an easy and interesting read.

Overall, Charles promises to help you become better in these areas:

Motivation

Teams

Focus

Goal setting

Managing others

Decision making

Innovation

Absorbing data

As a project manager the ideas can help you, as claimed by Charles, to become more productive and more effective. But, bare in mind it is a long read for a few concept which could be gathered elsewhere in a less time-consuming fashion.

Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works

Running Lean is written by Ash Maurya and the first edition of the book was published in 2012.

Ash is truly living as he learns. Ash didn’t just write the book directly, rather he began the book process by publishing various articles on his blog. He later turned those articles into a book using the methods and principle he preach.

The book will give you a blueprint for achieving a “product/market fit” for your venture. He claims this strategy could be used on any idea you have but they are primarily for IT adventures.

I’d highly recommend you to try, if not all, but some of the strategies, methods and techniques in your next project. This is about as agile/lean as you can get.

The basic ideas are nothing revolutionary, but Ash manages to put it all together with practical and helpful techniques.

You will probably find yourself coming back to the book when you need guidance and advice running lean projects.

TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

TED Talks is written by the TED Talks curator Chris Anderson and was published in 2016.

The speakers at TED events are generally considered to be the best in the world. The talks generates millions of views and likes.

It would then seem like a pretty good idea to learn from speakers to learn what makes them so interesting. This is exactly what Chris Anderson has done and put together in this book.

Chris has been working with TED since 2001 and helped their speakers to perform at their best.

The book covers the following topics:

Foundations

Talk tools

Preparation process

On stage

As a project manager you will end up speaking to people in both formal and informal settings. Therefore, this book is really helpful in order to improve your techniques and perform better at presentations, talks etc.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

So Good They Can’t Ignore You is written by Cal Newport and published in 2012.

Cal doesn’t give much for the saying “follow your passion”. Passion is not predetermined, but rather the results of being really good at something.

Accordingly to Cal you should focus on becoming a master of your craft, and only then you will experience what we call passion.

This mindset is really useful to remember when you are experience rough times in your work life. When you do, remember that changing to another professional that you have a “passion” for might not be the solution.

Rather, you should focus on getting better at your craft, learn from your mistakes and not give up.

As a project manager that would equal to educate yourself and continuously learn new stuff to excel in your field. By doing this you will get better and better and as a results, your passion for project management will increase.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Never Split the Difference is written by Chris Voss and published in 2016.

Negotiating is a crucial project management skill in order to deal and make progress with all different stakeholders.

Therefore, Chris comes to the rescue with his latest book Never Split The Difference.

The former FBI hostage negotiator has written an engaging book where he teaches his wisdom regarding negotiation.

One could argue that the scenarios where Chris learned and applied his techniques are so far off from the situations of a project manager. But, in the end we are all human beings and negotiating is really about human psychology which can be applied regardless of the situation.

As many other authors Chris enforces his ideas with real life stories. This makes it easier to remember and read.

Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

Lean Enterprise is about doing lean/agile within bigger companies. For smaller startups it comes naturally and they strive in an innovative setting.

However, large enterprises are often controlled and structured in a way that makes going lean difficult. An example of this is described in the book “The Phoenix Project” (also on this list) where an large organization turns the tides from not so much lean to very lean.

If you also want to make this change, then this book if you for. It will give you practical advice how to change your organization or project to being more lean within a large enterprise.

The book has become somewhat an authoritative reference for how large enterprises can embrace and become lean.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Cal is the youngest author who made it to this list. However, his idea are in clear contrast to what most of today’s youth are doing.

“Deep Work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.”

With that statement Cal claims that the most important skill you should develop is the ability to do deep work. Most of today’s workforce are spending their time with shallow activities which contributes little or no value.

Why?

Deep work is tough and requires both effort and training. The basic concept is to set aside a time slot which is 100% dedicated to a demanding, not shallow, task. Remove all distractions and focus purely on your task.

This book and concept is really useful to understand and apply for project managers. If your team members are working on demanding tasks – make sure they can fully focus on the task and do not let any distractions get in their way.

Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t

In his book Simon digs deeper into why some team works some why some don’t. The main idea is that higher performing teams have a deep sense of security and trust among the team members, while poor performing teams does not.

Simon also explains how this can be achieved with a focusing on the behavior and attitude from the team leader. The ideas are complemented with true stories from the military and corporate sector.

Understanding how and why some teams outperform others is a crucial knowledge for every project manager. That is why books like these should be must reads for all persons serious about getting good at project management.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

If you don’t know the answer to that question, then you should read this book.

Simon begins the book with telling us the whole idea started with he asking himself why did he do what he did. He struggled to find meaning and purpose in life and business.

So, in this book he explains the importance of knowing why you do what you do and how to discover your own why.

This skill and mindset of understanding the why is very useful and a must to apply in project teams. If you can get each and every team member to identify their own why, your team will be one step closer to becoming a truly high performing team.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

This little gem is a short and quick read. Michael has done a great job with keeping it fun and easy to read – yet the content is super practical and helpful.

Basically, Michael gives you 7 different questions to use when talking to or coaching others.

What’s on your mind?

And what else?

What’s the real challenge here for you?

What do you want?

How can I help?

If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?

What was most useful for you?

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to learn these. But, you do need some context and practice to use them wisely together. And it is only then, when used together, these questions really becomes a powerful tool when you need to coach someone.

For project managers these questions are amazing. They will be the backbone of your one-on-one with different team members and help you to really dig down and help the other person identify and deal with their problems.

https://www.robertpalmer.pw/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/BOOKS.png300800Robert Palmerhttps://www.robertpalmer.pw/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/0-1-e1468342597128-300x43.pngRobert Palmer2017-04-07 10:15:302019-12-11 18:22:02Top 19 Project Management Books That Will Take You To The Next Level

A very important part in any project is to find what worked well and what could be improved, in other words, identify the lessons learned. If you feel that there is nothing that can’t be improved for your next project you are on a downhill battle.

If you don’t move forward, you are moving backwards.

In this article I will share with you 17 of the most important lessons learned you can take as an IT project manager.

Requirements, requirements and more requirements

Bright man writing down requirements.

Unfortunately, it is quite common that IT project starts like this:

Some very bright men and women sit down together and begin to write down all of the requirements that they can think of for the new software/system that that are so eager to see developed.

But, what do you think usually happens with this approach when the project is coming to an end?

One, or a combination, of these three outcomes usually happens:

The end results are lacking a lot of the defined functionality

The need from the users have changed

Everything is developed accordingly to the requirements and the needs has not been changed.

In all honesty, the first two outcomes are much more likely to happen than the third.

Let me tell you why:

Writing down all the functionality for a software/system and then leave everything to the developers until they say it’s ready for testing is generally a bad idea.

With that approach you have no possibility to verify that you are on the right track, make changes or come up with different, better functionalities until everything is ready.

Instead, you should focus on specifying just enough to keep your team to be busy for 2-4 weeks.

When those weeks have passed you should be able to test and review what has been developed.

After that you can define changes to what has been developed or new functionality that you want in the coming 2-4 weeks.

Listen to me!

But that was the easy question. The tough one is: How do you ask the users?

One obvious way is to send out a survey. But you should also consider interviewing your end users.

If fact, Ash Maurya spends one third of his book Running Lean telling us how and why interviews are the best method to get feedback.

Your game plan should look something like this:

Identify users that have an interest in your project/software

Conduct 30 minute interviews with them

If possible, put them in charge of defining the functionality, explaining it to the supplier and also testing it

This will give your chosen users a great feeling of involvement and make them excellent promoters of the project.

I have my own system

I make my own decisions.

As a project manager you will be in charge of setting up the plan, framework and techniques used for your project.

That is an essential part of your job.

But from my experience you might run into people that have their own way of doing stuff, and they are not interested in changing that.

And that is OK, you should be flexible and leave some decision to the single project members to keep their locus of control high and thus also their motivation.

My Lesson Learned

One small example is JIRA vs Excel.

A member of one of my teams didn’t like JIRA and used her own system of tracking tasks in Excel.

We tried several times to get her into JIRA but our attempt didn’t succeed.

But in the end of the day, did it matter?

The answer is both yes and no.

Although she didn’t always have the latest status of the tasks from the development team, she stayed motivated and worked hard with her tasks by making the decision to use Excel instead of JIRA herself.

If we had to force her into JIRA she would have gotten demotivated and we would have had a bigger problem on our plate.

What’s the status?

It’s a dashboard, very useful.

There is usually a lot of people involved in a project.

And most of them are interested in getting the right information and status regarding your project.

From my experience these are the best way for informing others of the status:

Set up a high level overview of the project on a big wall

Use digital dashboard for a detailed status

The high level overview is meant to show everybody the road-map and status at the general level.

This will enable people to just swing by and have a look, this will also give you the opportunity to strike up a conversation with the them easily.

The digital dashboard is for creating a more detailed status of the progress. This is kept digital since the changes here happen more often so it would be a full time job to reflect all changes manually on a wall.

Loading, loading, loading…

Just wait a little bit more…

People are impatient and people don’t like to wait.

There have been many studies published about for how long people wait until they get frustrated and leave a website/software.

So, you should really be focusing on building a high performing system. This should ideally have been defined in the project contract, with for example the acceptable average loading time for a user.

But in my experience the performance issue is largely ignored until it becomes a problem.

But then it is too late.

Your system will be the cause of frustration and will get a bad reputation of being slow and not very usable.

It is ready for test…

When a developer finished developing a task you will often get a short message saying it is ready for testing.

But even though the tasks has been clearly defined and what was done is easily understood by the developer the person who are to test it needs more information of what has been done.

Too often I hear that the person who is about to test doesn’t know how the supplier solved the task and how to test it.

This boils down to bad communication.

The solution?

Arrange a meeting where the developers can present and demo the new functionality. And only after that the customer can test and verify it on her own.

Letting the developers demo the functionality themselves also adds extra motivation for them to do some testing on their own beforehand. It also adds an opportunity to identify issues together at the demo meeting.

Ain’t nobody got time for that

A lady with no time.

Usually people involved in a project are not engaged full time.

They have a lot of other responsibilities and work to do.

So, when you ask them to do something project related a common reply is that they don’t have the time.